Described on the back cover as the “adventures of a curious character,” “Surely you’re joking Mr. Feynman!” is a transcription of conversations between nobel-prize winning physicist Richard P. Feynman and his friend Ralph Leighton. It chronicles his early interest in tinkering with radios through his years working in Los Alamos on the Manhattan project, and on to his dalliances with Art, bongo playing, Mayan mathematics, and practical jokes.
This has to be one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read in a long time – I’ve long been a fan of Feynman for his unpretentious attitude to life. He was truly someone who kept a child-like fascination with the world around him long past the point at which most people have begun to accept the state of things as unchangeable fact. This constant curiosity and playful attitude to life coupled with his razor-sharp intellect led to his winning of the Nobel prize for physics in 1965.
It’s very interesting to get an insight as to how one of the greatest minds of the twentieth century mulled over problems – it seems a lot of how he figured out a puzzle was by direct analogy. If presented with a set of facts, he would construct some simple mental model which exhibited the same state as the known facts, E.g. representing an abstract concept as two balls that spin, and add more properties as more facts are known. Then when presented with a question about the state of the theory, he could relate the question to his constructed model and answer whether the theory was likely to be true based on how his set of “spinning balls” would react given the new information.
His playful side is covered during a very funny chapter detailing his obsession with safe-cracking during Los Alamos. He figured out a method for reducing the number of turns needed to crack a safe, and became known as the go-to guy when any given safe was unavailable when the owner was away on holiday or similar. He took an avid interest in Frigideira playing (described as a “musical frying pan”!),became a competent artist, and could adequately converse in Portuguese and Japanese. The impression you get from the book is that he would happily immerse himself in just about anything that took his interest just for the sake of learning. He describes some initial inspiration for his Nobel-prize winning work as originating from a proof he developed after watching someone in the college cafeteria throwing a plate and wondering why the spinning of the pattern didn’t seem to match the “wobble”.
The final chapter is an adaptation of a talk he gave at Caltech in 1974 on “Cargo Cult Science“, a call for integrity and discipline during scientific investigation. He was someone who shunned pretense and snobbery throughout his life, and initially tried to not accept the Nobel prize. I’d highly recommend the book, and also suggest watching clips of him on youtube to get an idea of this “curious character”.
The weekly retweet
A recap on any interesting links I posted or retweeted this week
I’ve been messing with Django recently, and wanted to record a few setup notes for future reference. It might be of use for anyone else who’s experimenting with it to have some setup notes in one place.
I’m playing with a small project as a learning exercise which I hope to announce in the next few months and coming from the configuration-heavy world of J2EE using Spring and Hibernate, Django is a breath of fresh air. Django’s version of MVC is very nicely put together, and the framework comes complete with just about every feature that you might attempt to write yourself such as generic views, cache plugins, and URL rewriting. The ORM is fantastic, and Django 1.1’s addition of aggregation and “greedy” fetching of foreign key relationships using select_related() is a pleasure (though be sure to filter the fields you need or you can end up with unnecessary database queries).
Django setup with MySQL on Ubuntu -
- Download Django
- Download the latest version of MySQLDB for Python
- Before you build / install the above you’ll probably need the python dev libs and the mysql dev libs:
- sudo apt-get install python-all-dev
- sudo apt-get install libmysqlclient15-dev
- Install MysqlDB and Django, start reading through the django book.
(As an aside, when you’re missing a library on ubunutu is there any easy way to figure out what apt package it resides in? I would like to be able to figure it out without resorting to just asking google and finding that some other poor soul has spent a few hours looking for the answer.)
I’d recommend mod_wsgi over mod_python. In completely unscientific performance tests mod_wsgi seemed to play nicer with the other children. Here’s a good install document for Django and mod_wsgi.
An alternate to these notes is this step-by-step guite to django on ubuntu, including memcached, Nginx, and a whole host of other nonsense you probably don’t need to do some tinkering.
The Tuesday Push is a crowd-sourced approach to PR with a little word-of-mouth marketing thrown in. It gives Irish businesses a push on the web and occasionally a little advice.
Unrelated picture by 89AKurt @ flickr
This week’s Tuesday Wednesday push is whoseview.com, a community review site for Dublin businesses. The Tuesday Push seems to have met some sort of untimely end – it may just be to do with general lethargy from the recent bank holiday weekend, or it may be that this week’s Tuesday Push is for yet another community business directory and reviewers are jaded. I’m wondering what happened – the concept started off with around fifteen or so bloggers pushing the idea and offering criticism and advice, and after a few weeks it dwindled to one or two. I deliberately avoided writing a post yesterday to see who’s still pushing, and the only review I could find for yesterday’s Tuesday Push is by Paul Watson. Get off your asses!
Whoseview is a nicely designed site who are picking a relatively tight niche by focusing on Dublin businesses, before planning expansion into other major Irish cities and beyond. A little more focused than the approaches by mytown.ie and loopthing.com who are trying to list all Irish businesses and all businesses everywhere respectively, but not as focused as Revahealth who have found a very focused, profitable channel. Trying to list everything in the country or world is no more a “series of narrow channels” then trying to swim across every ocean in the world is “going for a little paddle before dinner”. I can get behind whoseview’s approach of focusing on one city and branching from there, and I’m a big fan of the look and feel of the site. It’s polished and professional, and blows the doors off most of the competitors in terms of usability. As Paul points out, the sign-up is a little convoluted though.
Now for the dispicable(sp) bit where the author gives out unwanted advice. Do we really need another Irish review site? Yes, it’s niche. Yes, it’s very polished. No, it’s not original – but then again, what really original concepts does the Internet really provide? As long as you’re offering something even 10% new you can succeed, and if you focus on a small enough business area you will find it easier to make money than trying to cater to everyone and everything. That said, they’re competing in a crowded space where a lot of sites are offering similar and overlapping service offerings. I believe the key will be solid concent, SEO, and marketing.
If I offer a minor criticism (total nitpicking for the sake of it) it’s that the site loads somewhat slowly on my crappy national-telephone-company-provided connection. I’d recommend moving their static content to another server (from the cookie settings it looks like a the current one is a java container), and using apache/ngix/whatever flavor of server to set far-future expires headers to allow for browser caching and serve the images without cookies. Possibly also combine their CSS into one file, make Yahoo’s YUI Compressor part of their build process, and use Yslow / Google pagespeed to tweak accordingly.
